Projects

Although science is increasingly recognized as a key dimension of early learning, findings to date indicate that young children, especially those enrolled in public preschool programs serving historically excluded communities, have limited opportunities to engage in high quality science investigations. The lack of professional learning resources available to teachers makes it challenging for them to feasibly and effectively promote science in their classrooms. To address this need, this four-year design and development project brings together public preschool teachers, families from culturally and linguistically diverse communities, early learning and STEM researchers, and designers of media to co-design a Professional Learning Hub for Early Science.

Providing students with exposure to high quality computational thinking (CT) activities within science classes has the possibility to create transformative educational experiences that will prepare students to harness the power of CT for authentic problems. By building upon foundational research in human-AI partnership for classroom support and effective practices for integrating CT in science, this collaborative research project will advance understanding of how to empower teachers to lead computationally enriched science activities with adaptive pedagogical tools.

This partnership development project deepens an existing partnership between the researcher and leadership of an elementary school in central Texas that serves predominantly Black and Latine students. The project focuses on engaging community members, teachers, and learners at the school in conversation about how mathematics teaching and learning might be improved. This partnering is important because the relationship between schools and communities is often marked by one-way communication and decision-making without dialogue. By promoting dialogue, all members of this partnership can learn more about the mathematical storylines embedded into the community, that is, the stories that community members, teachers, and learners share about their personal relationship to mathematics teaching and learning. 

National frameworks for science education in the United States advocate for bringing science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and computer science (STEM+CS) disciplines together in K-12 classrooms. Although curricular materials are emerging to support STEM+CS integration, research demonstrates that teachers need support to engage students in authentic STEM+CS practices that leverage and sustain student and community assets. This project aims to support middle school teachers in their enactment of an integrated science, engineering, and computational modeling curriculum unit and understand how teachers customize computationally rich, Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS)-aligned curricular materials to their own schools and classrooms.

Writing instruction in math and science is an essential area of research to ensure equitable K-12 and college experiences and to better prepare all students in ways that provide opportunities to pursue STEM career pathways. This project is a meta-analysis in the area of secondary (grades 6-12) math and science writing instruction.

This project will develop and study approaches to equip 4th and 5th grade general and special education teachers to teach computer science (CS) to a broad range of learners with disabilities through professional development. The project will aim to improve accessibility, accommodations, and highlight the role of paraeducators to increase participation and learning in CS for students with disabilities, and it will investigate the impact of the professional development on teachers’ instruction and the influence of the professional development model on student learning, ability beliefs, and attitudes about CS.

Anxiety about math has increased for some students due to disruptions in their learning during the COVID-19 pandemic. This partnership development project involving Portland State University and the Tigard-Tualatin School District addresses pandemic-related learning challenges in middle school mathematics, with a focus on math anxiety. Across the yearlong project, the partners play equal roles in co-developing research, practice, and policy proposals aimed at enhancing math outcomes and reducing math anxiety among the district’s middle school students.

Environmental issues like wildfires can serve as effective science learning contexts to promote scientific literacy and citizenship. This project will partner with teachers, teacher educators, and disciplinary experts in data science, fire ecology, public health, and environmental communication to co-design a data-driven, justice-oriented, and issue-based unit on wildfires. In the unit, student will engage in various data practices to gain insights into the issue of wildfires and how it affects their lives and communities. The project seeks to theorize how learners can leverage disciplinary knowledge and practices in environmental and data science as a foundation for making data-informed actions towards a more just and sustainable society.

Although there is a push to integrate artificial intelligence (AI) in K-12 education, the novelty of AI means that little is known about what schools, teachers, students, and parents know, need, and expect regarding AI in classrooms. The lack of access to AI knowledge and training is especially significant in rural high-needs communities where schools are under-resourced. This year-long partnership development project will seek to strengthen and expand existing research-practice partnerships (RPPs) with East Tennessee teachers and school leaders, develop new RPPs with parents and students enrolled in East Tennessee middle and high schools, and co-construct a shared vision for AI that aligns with the needs and assets of the partner community.

Tutoring programs that are jointly supported by schools and universities can offer benefits to both parties. The programs, however, are only helpful to the extent they respond to the needs and interests of the students and schools they serve. This project will establish a partnership between a large, urban university and a small, rural high school to collaboratively create a tutoring program to support the mathematics learning of students with learning disabilities.

Partnership development between universities and school districts requires an understanding that each organization has a distinct institutional point of view that must be considered in defining and shaping collaborative work. The goals and objectives of each organization may not always align, and at times may compete or conflict with each other. With the understanding that successful partnerships are those where practitioners and researchers achieve high levels of trust, commitment, transparency, interdependence, and mutual benefit, this project centers on building a partnership between a university that serves a largely Hispanic student population and a rural school district that also serves a community that has long been underrepresented in STEM education and career opportunities. The partners will jointly focus on how to respond to three negative impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic: 1) limited access to quality learning opportunities, 2) increased student learning gaps in STEM subjects, and 3) a local teacher shortage.

This project will improve STEM education by studying the various strategies taught to and used by students for solving multi-digit multiplication and division to develop a more cohesive understanding of children's multiplicative reasoning. The work will also support teachers’ ability to better support students’ multiplicative reasoning strategies via professional development videos that help them learn about students’ strategies.

High school and first-year college mathematics courses sometimes act as gatekeepers, ‘weeding out’ students who struggle with the subject matter and narrowing students’ opportunities for advanced STEM education and employment. Acknowledging opportunity gaps for students of color and those experiencing poverty, this partnership development project brings together Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS), Milwaukee Area Technical College (MATC), and WestEd to establish dual enrollment math courses that function as a lever for equity.

While more accessible online learning opportunities that reflect everyday teaching challenges are becoming more available, most of these more flexible professional development experiences are being offered by colleges and universities to teachers who are not yet in the classroom. This situation provides an opportunity to explore how innovations in teacher professional development can be woven into school districts’ regular professional development work with its teachers. This partnership development project will create a shared vision and plan for making digitally-based teaching tasks available to elementary math and science teachers so they can learn at any time and from anywhere.

This project partners with a mathematics department at a public middle school to co-design, analyze, and improve teachers’ translanguaging pedagogies, that is pedagogies that draw on students’ full linguistic repertoires as resources for their learning. This project will investigate how teachers make sense of and enact translanguaging pedagogies, how translanguaging pedagogies shape students’ mathematical experiences and learning opportunities, and how teachers’ learning of translanguaging spaces can be supported.

Over the years, researchers and practitioners have created and tested different ways to support students who struggle with learning mathematics. These methods include directly teaching various mathematics skills and strategies that affect mathematics performance, such as alleviating mathematics anxiety and fostering motivation and engagement in mathematics learning. The idea is that teaching mathematics using a mix of these skills or strategies might help students learn better than teaching just one skill or strategy at a time. However, it remains unclear which skills or strategies should be taught together and if mixing different skills or strategies leads to differential effects across different students or contexts. Understanding this is vital because it can help researchers and practitioners determine the best ways to address the need of struggling students in mathematics. A network meta-analysis will allow the field to examine different combinations of instructional skills/strategies as well as their interaction effects, which can provide more optimal information about different instructional approaches.

Effective “early” algebra interventions in elementary grades that can develop all students’ algebra readiness for later grades are needed. This study will use an experimental design to test the effectiveness of a Grades K–2 early algebra intervention when implemented in diverse classroom settings by elementary teachers. The broader impact of the study will be to deepen the role of algebra in elementary grades, provide much-needed curricular support for elementary teachers, and strengthen college and career readiness standards and practices.

This project examines student and teacher experiences with the de-tracking of math sequences in a public school district in Western Oregon. It examines how a district-wide cohort of middle school students, as individuals and in groups, identify with and define what it means to be good at math, and how these identities shift over time as they progress through math sequences. It also establishes a partnership between a mathematics education researcher and a school district (Research Practice Partnership) to study changes in pedagogy, define problems of teaching practice, and design solutions as the district transitions to de-tracked classes.

This project will contribute knowledge about cultivating and strengthening productive mathematical identities of early childhood and elementary students. The project has the potential to improve kindergarten to third grade mathematics education for students from historically and persistently marginalized groups by intentionally leveraging (and confirming) resources for productive mathematical identity development. Further, this project will also equip educators to design number talks building upon students’ funds of knowledge and to also support their efforts to positively develop students’ mathematical identities.

Semiconductors are essential components of electronic devices, enabling advances in important applications and systems such as communication, healthcare, and national security. In order to sustain the U.S.'s global competitiveness in the semiconductor industry, there is a growing demand for a skilled semiconductor workforce. High schoolers are among the most frequent users of electronic devices. However, many do not know how these devices are designed and manufactured. To address the knowledge gaps and workforce needs equitably, this project will develop a semiconductor curriculum with high-school-aged students from diverse backgrounds, and with partners in higher education, K-12, and industries, enhanced with artificial intelligence (AI) and other innovative technologies.

Science and engineering teaching and curriculum have begun to engage learners’ knowledge of themselves, their communities, and their experiences of science and engineering. This knowledge can make the experience of learning science and engineering more meaningful and impactful as learners can see greater connections between the content and how their own experiences and communities. However, assessment approaches for documenting and presenting what learners’ know have typically not been able to sufficiently represent the new approaches to teaching and learning. This conference brings together researchers, school leaders, and teachers to develop frameworks and resources for making culturally sustaining approaches to teaching and learning science and engineering.

The Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) will host a workshop that brings together NSF-funded teams working on midscale research infrastructure incubator projects for STEM education research with a focus on education equity. ICPSR will share information, resources, and support incubator teams in developing and managing mid-scale infrastructure projects. These incubator projects have identified research infrastructure gaps related to assessments, teacher practices, and digital tools to support student learning and have proposed pilot tools, cyberinfrastructure, large-scale datasets, etc., for filling these gaps. To scale these pilots, the teams will need to successfully develop proposals to create mid-scale research infrastructure (Midscale RI). However, Midscale RI proposals require specialized knowledge that is not common within the STEM education research community and thus may limit the community’s ability to develop competitive Midscale RI proposals.

K-12 teachers are a critical resource for promoting equitable STEM achievement and attainment. Experimental research, however, rarely identifies specific, transferable STEM instructional practices, because STEM education research has typically implemented student-level randomization far more than it has implemented teacher-level randomization. A major barrier limiting scientific progress is the lack of a large-scale trialing infrastructure that can support teacher-level randomization and experimentation, given the logistical constraints of recruiting multiple sites and successfully randomizing at the teacher or classroom level. This Midscale Research Infrastructure Incubator will launch a two-year, accelerated process to address these challenges and develop a consensus plan for a STEM-teacher-focused trialing platform.

In the 21st century, the educational landscape is undergoing a seismic shift, with Artificial Intelligence (AI) emerging as a pivotal force reshaping the contours of teaching and learning, especially in the realm of science education. As educators, policymakers, and researchers grapple with the challenges and opportunities presented by this technological juggernaut, this project underscores the imperative to weave AI's transformative potential seamlessly with the foundational principles of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI). The vision driving this initiative is twofold: harnessing the unparalleled capabilities of AI to revolutionize educational experiences while ensuring that these innovations are accessible, relevant, and beneficial to every student, irrespective of their background or circumstances.

The goal of the project is to understand the current conditions, challenges, and resources that pertain to mathematics education in rural areas in the United States.